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Lost cycle or bad reading

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today, just before my wc i did some tests using my api test kit. my readings were ammonia:0.10-25 nitrite:0 nitrate:5.
WHY did my ammonia have a reading.
all my fish have been thriving and are happy. is this a bad reading?
can some one help me out here.
btw it is a 20 gallon with
2 platy 2 oto 6 neon tetra.
i only have an ac 20 filter in there. but i thought it will be fine because i would say i only stocked to 65%.
or should i add more. i never had a problem before.
thanks in advance

i am using my brand new api test kit. my tank is planted. like lightly to moderately planted.
do u have any suggestions? anything i'm doing wrong. OH, i remember last month i poured un conditioned water in my tank. my filter was on. but in a matter of 30 sec it hit me and i dosed entire tank. i dont think that has anything to do with it, but might as well mention it.

Yeah, that's nothing to be concerned about - Tap water is not going to ruin anything unless you leave it unconditioned for a much longer period of time.

Maybe you have plant matter decaying and that is pushing the bioload over the limit? Perhaps you do need more filtration. If you have ammonia in the water, that means that ammonia is coming out of the filter, which means that there's not enough bacteria in the system to consume it all. What do you actually have in the filter - for media?

bio media, sponge, activated carbon. i don't change the carbon btw, it came with the filter so i let it stay there to form a small colony of bacteria. should i mention 1 of my oto is freakishly huge. it's very fat and like 2.5 inches.

carbon doesn't hold as much bacteria, bio media holds the most. and none of my fish have grown. well at least to the point where i have noticed it.
on aq advisoe ( a site that calculates your stock, filter and tank and tells you if u need to add filtration, change stock...etc.) it says that my filter deals with 118% of the waste in my tank. any other suggestions. oh ya, a couple months ago my guppy disapeared. he was never found. could it be him decaying? and thank you very much for your help

I think you may have misunderstood what I meant. Activated carbon has a huge surface area, though I was not suggesting that you use it for biomedia. I was saying that it has ceased functioning as chemical media and now has a primary function of housing bacteria.

Regardless of what aqadvisor says, if you have ammonia in your water, then your filtration system is handling less than 100% of the waste in your tank. It might just be a mini cycle, in which case things should balance out within a few days. If it's a chronic problem, then the only answer I have is to add more filtration.